"How are you, dear?" said Louie gently. "Yes, your cousin told me you were going away for a bit."
"Right away," said Kitty. "I can, you see; I haven't got to work if I don't want to; though I'm not rich, of course. Neither is Annie, but I don't like to see men doing the housework like Cousin Frank for all that. I've told Frank so again and again. 'Be an agent,' I've said time after time; 'for typewriters, or mangles, or tea, or anything you like, but get out of the house; it isn't a man's place.' And it isn't.... You've heard?" she broke off suddenly to say.
She blinked at Louie. Her neck above her nightgown was hardly more substantial than that of a chicken; her hands seemed to have become as veined as a skeleton leaf. Louie took one of them.
"Always running errands and setting the table—it isn't a man's life," Kitty continued. "'What does agent mean?' I said to him. 'Pull yourself together and make it mean something, Frank!' I said. 'You're not very big, but you're strong, and you've got your wits about you,' I said.... You've heard?" she demanded once more.
"Well, tell me how you are," said Louie, patting the thin hand soothingly.
"But have you heard the news? Glad tidings for all. 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest'—that's what we all want—rest; though why they should print 'Come' in red and 'unto' in green and 'Me' in purple, and all the letters like twigs, I'm sure I can't tell you, my dear. And always Oxford frames. I must ask Mr. Folliott. 'Though your sins be as crimson——'"
"You haven't asked how my little boy is, Kitty," said Louie.
"'Suffer the little children, and forbid them not'—how is he?"
But she did not wait for an answer. She was off again—the doctor, the Reverend Mr. Folliott, her approaching visit to Margate. And always she returned to the indignity of a man's doing women's work about the house. It was in this connection that she suddenly mentioned, in a way that gave Louie a slight start, the name of Mr. Jeffries.
"I will at least say that for him," she prattled; "I shouldn't have got sick of the sight of him; out of the house at half-past nine he'd have been, and that would have been the end of him till six o'clock; not always bumping into you like Frank. I suppose you know Miss Levey's there too, at his Company? He's getting on there like anything. So's Mr. Mackie; you remember Mr. Mackie? He takes the auction himself now on Mondays and Thursdays; in Oxford Street; everybody stops as they walk past; he's a caution, is Mr. Mackie, I can tell you! But of course Jeff"—here she became mysterious, and nodded once or twice—"Jeff's on the way up—up. It's a different class of work from Mr. Mackie's; better, as you might say; he's in the Confidential Exchange Department, Miriam says——"